Return to Naboo - A Clone Wars Short Story
by Ahsoka Skysword
Summary: Ahsoka Skysword and Anakin Darkforcer are returning to Naboo, finally. But nothing prepares them for what they will find inside. *****FOR DARTH RYU'S CWA CHARACTER WIKI WRITING CONTEST*****


Return to Naboo

_the ones we love never truly leave us_

It was exactly how she remembered it. The small, subtle house and the beautiful gardens. The treehouse stationed carefully in the tallest tree. The dome-shaped roof. The toys lying around and the paintings that had long since dried in the sun. And despite her fears of what she might find inside, Ahsoka found herself smiling. From what the house looked like outside, Ashley Skysword might have just left for school. Nothing had changed.

Anakin quietly pressed the handle. It was locked. Ahsoka opened the pouch on her belt and took from it a solitary silver key with a soundless bell tied to it. She placed it inside the lock, took a deep breath and turned it. It clicked and Anakin pushed the door open. Together, shoulders nearly banging off the doorframe, they stepped in.

Ahsoka heard silence. She climbed the spiral staircase onto the top floor, and gazed around. There were four doors, all spaced evenly around the circular room. Ahsoka went to the last door and gazed at the beautiful paintjob of the word, "Ashley." She swallowed back her tears, turned the handle and entered her room.

It was the same sky-blue paint with the swirly, fluffy clouds and birds. The window was outlined by a cloud and the bed was right underneath it, so that if you were lying on it you could turn your head and look into the sky outside. It was on the window sill, which stuck out far enough for someone to sleep on it, but not so low that you didn't have to heave yourself up.

The window was letting sunlight flit through the room, illuminating the stuffed animals strewn across the room, along with the cups and plates of fake food, like Anakin had just thundered through and disrupted the tea party. Now she was fighting to keep her tears down. The memories…coming back to her like blaster shots in the chest. She remembered having two natural legs, remembered painting with Anakin, splatter painting his face…and Leena.

The memory of Leena brought tears to her eyes, but she refused to let them out. And carefully, without touching anything, without disrupting what surely was a dream, Ahsoka backed out of the room and shut the door silently.

Tears were dripping down Anakin's face as he closed to the door to his room. He choked out the words, "Let's go," and they climbed back down the staircase.

Nothing could have prepared them for what they were about to find.

Her cybernetic leg clanking, disrupting the stillness of the house, Ahsoka entered the kitchen. And the tears she had been fighting to prevent erupted.

Leena Skysword's body lay, mangled and broken, on the floor. Her eyes stared without seeing, and she was as still as a rock, and as cold as ice.

"Mom," Ahsoka whispered. She dropped to her knees, beside her mother's body.

"Ahsoka," said Anakin.

Anakin's words could not penetrate the fog that seemed to have set over Ahsoka's mind. She blocked it all out; the only real thing was Leena's body and the thought that her voice would never be heard again.

Ahsoka's tear landed on her mother's cheek.

"Sorry," she whispered hoarsely, as if there were some incredible way Leena might hear her through her cold, dead ears.

And then Ahsoka thought about how silly it was to think her dead mother could speak to her when she was in some far off land with new people and new surroundings and new everything. She wiped the tear off with her wrist and, together, she and Anakin lifted their mother up with the Force and carried her up the stairs into her room. Ahsoka let go for a second to pull the sheets down on her bed, and they placed her down on the mattress. Then, without a second glace, they pulled the sheets up, closed the door and swept down the stairs into the cool, fresh air.

Tears made tracks down her face as she locked the door behind her. Fury towards Cad Bane, fury like what she had never felt before, came back to her and she wiped her face with her arm, concealing it from Anakin.

Anakin had boarded their ship. But she wasn't quite ready to leave yet. She dipped her finger in the blue paint (it had been capped, though it was still miraculous that it hadn't dried out) and carefully handwrote on the ground: the ones we love never truly leave us. And then she drew three people: a small Trandoshan, a small Togruta, and a tall Togruta standing with her arms around the two toddlers' shoulders. Her tear landed on her own figure's eye and smudged it.

Ashley Skysword turned and banished her sadness into darkness. She would never, ever again, fail her mother. Her last wish.

As the planet grew smaller and smaller, so did her emotions.

The trip to Naboo had changed her.

But never again would she fail.


End file.
